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The Quest
Previous Chapter ***** I was ready. Micah had been kidnapped by The Daemon. Tommy knew it. According to Alicia, Luke knew it, too. Tommy couldn’t deal with the memories, Luke grew up and stopped believing. Which left me. I had to confront the creature myself, complete the childhood quest we’d never finished, and find whatever was left of my best friend. I wasn’t crazy. I, alone, had uncovered the truth. That’s what the ghost of Mathilde was trying to tell me. I needed to stop lying to myself, stop taking pills that dulled my intuition, and trust the little girl I’d once been. Trust what that little girl had seen, all those years ago. I felt something wet in the pocket of my jeans. Crushed jasmine flowers. I remembered the night I’d ventured into the forest. When I’d chased Mathilde to the Starshine Gate. The gate at which we’d always meet Micah. Kevin Gideon dropped Micah off in front of a little white house with big windows. Across Huntington from the Starshine Gate, there was a row of little white houses with big windows. '' I’d seen the eyes of The Daemon, glowing in the light of the… ''Jasmine flowers, picked under the full moon. I pulled the shovel from under my bed. I stuck it in my backpack. I took a knife from the kitchen. I peered into Alicia’s room, and saw that she had retreated to the bathroom to shower. The minute I heard the water running, I slipped out of the house and drove to the closest liquor store. When I returned, I locked myself in my room with a plastic baggie full of raw ingredients. The sun was setting by the time I’d finished preparing. I threw on my jacket. I tossed my backpack over my shoulders. I marched like a soldier to the front door, and nearly tripped over my sister. Alicia, sitting on the couch, stood when I approached. I could tell she’d been waiting for me. “Ansley,” she said firmly, “where are you going?” I froze. I blinked. “Out.” I hadn’t thought to prepare a disposable lie. Jaw set, Alicia strode to the door, positioning herself between it and me. “Who were you yelling at, earlier?” I fished for an acceptable diversion, then realized I didn’t want to have this conversation. I was sick of having this conversation. Of explaining myself, defending my mental state, being told again and again that my own experiences were nothing more than delusion. I’d tried it their way. I’d taken my pills and stopped trusting my instincts, and where had that gotten me? Where had reality gotten them? Kevin Gideon was dead. Tommy was dead. And, a decade later, they still hadn’t found Micah’s body. '' No. I wasn’t doing it. I stepped to Alicia’s left. She blocked me again. With both hands, harder than was necessary, harder than I should have, I pushed her. Emitting a small cry, she stumbled and fell to the shag carpet, landing in the pile of yellowing mail she’d been pestering me about. “Ansley!” she yelped, her voice sharp with terror. “If you leave, I’m calling the cops.” I ignored her. I ran for the door, slammed it behind me, and kept on running. Down the street, across 5th Avenue, to the gates of Allister Park. To the gates of the underworld. Then came the cry. The roar, like a freight train, like fire emitted from the belly of a beast, ancient and furious. It shook the ground. I smelled sulfur in the air. It knew I was coming. ****** In the low dusk sunlight, Allister Park reclaimed its color. The steel slide shimmered. The play structure loomed like the Emerald City in remastered technicolor - rich green monkey bars, drawbridge of fire engine red, sky-blue swings swaying in the warm summer breeze. But, despite the perfect evening, the playground was empty. The hard foam floor bulged. Something was straining against it, tearing, forcing its way up from the sand buried beneath. I reached into my backpack. POP! POP! POP! Torn pieces of foam flew into the air as yellow tubes shot out. The Bagwurms, freed from their manufactured prison, writhed and wiggled like air socks in a hurricane - sickly, banana-yellow, thick as a fist and solid. They hit the ground like fallen streamers, stretched, and shot towards my feet. They were surprisingly fast. I shook my first bottle of Starshine Juice. As the thick yellow worms came together, like slimy spokes on a wheel, I twisted off the lid. My finger covering half of the mouth of the bottle, I sprayed a stream of explosive foam. I thought the worms would retreat. They didn’t. As the Diet Coke and week-old jasmine mix settled on their monochrome flesh, it began to melt. There was a sound like bacon frying in a pan, followed by a high pitched screech from no discernible source, then a gurgling. A smell of molten plastic as their cylindrical bodies softened to putty, then to liquid with the consistency and color of house paint. It flowed onto the concrete. I jumped backwards as it splashed against my shoes with a distasteful warmth. Leaving the liquefying worms behind me, I ran for The Forest. Under the swing set, maybe twenty feet from me, a giant bubble formed. Little fissures broke across the hard foam. With a violent SHOOP, the Great Bagwurm burst from her subterranean kingdom. I’d imagined her as a longer, thicker yellow tube - the gargantuan version of her subjects, presently reduced to mush. As her majestic head shot into the air, six-foot-long feelers arched predatorily, followed by her meter-thick body, I realized I’d been horrifically wrong. She was not a worm, but a giant centipede. Her sectioned bulk was bright red, hard, with the consistency of plastic. She reared like a mythical snake, her bulbous, fanged head feet above mine; hissed viciously. I had my hand on the cap of my second bottle of Starshine Juice when she dove. I jumped to the side and landed, awkwardly, on my right arm. I felt the granular scrape of the material through my jacket, and pain shot up from my weak ankle. I snatched up the bottle as it rolled, sat up, frantically twisted as the gargantuan anthropoid looped around, straightened, prepared for her next strike. I pulled myself to my feet. I reached into the pocket of my jeans. As the Great Bagwurm reared backwards again, I pulled out the high-caliber artillery - a roll of Mentos. I maneuvered a little white mint out of its wax paper sheath, pulled the cap off the bottle I still held, dropped the Mento through the mouth, and aimed the resulting violent fountain at the hard-plastic monstrosity in front of me. There was red smoke, sulfur stench, an ear-splitting screech. As the smoke-and-carbonation haze lifted and the soda blast weakened to a trickle, I saw the fruits of my attack. Black spots on her red exoskeleton. Murder in her clustered, pupil-less eyes. Crap. I’d just pissed her off. Hissing her war cry, she dove for me again, hundreds of legs flailing. I dodged her exposed fangs; felt itchy cilia brush against my cheek. As I regained my footing, I remembered something Micah had said to me, once. ''She’s got a really hard exoskeleton, like a lobster or rhinoceros beetle. Did you know that rhinoceros beetles can carry like 800 times their weight? I ran. Ran to the left, towards the basketball court and the softball diamond. The air displaced by The Great Bagwurm’s leviathan body set the swings jerking violently. The metallic caterwauling shook my memory, brought to the forefront Micah’s childlike voice. We can’t just, like, squirt her with Starshine Juice. I think I should find out where her exoskeleton is weak. I stopped running. I dislodged my backpack, reached in, wrapped my hand around my knife and my final bottle of Starshine Juice. She was behind me. I felt hot breath, the pressure of hundreds of legs vibrating the ground. I didn’t look back. I twisted the cap of the bottle. I poured the now-warm soda onto the blade of the knife. I turned. Her bulging, million-eyed head was ten feet from me. Teeth bared. Orange mouth wide open, revealing a meter-wide, ribbed throat, muscles contracting in expectation. Two feet. One foot. I lunged. Hot, moldy beef breath. Putrid moisture against my cheeks. Boiling saliva on my hand, stinging, burning. Then The Great Bagwurm threw herself backwards. She screeched like a banshee, shaking her great head, thrashing about, trying to dislodge my knife from the roof of her mouth. The sulfur reek came back with a vengeance. Her howl shot up a decibel, in disharmony with a crackling sound like microwave popcorn. The Starshine Juice was cooking her from the inside. I was at the treeline before the gaseous explosion and the sticky SPLAT. The Forest was dark, darker than it should have been. I could barely make out the outlines of individual oak trees by the light seeping through the thick canopy of leaves. The sounds of The Forest were soothing - crickets chirping, small mammals rustling in the trees, the occasional flutter of wings, a dog’s staccato bark, far away. The crunch of my shoes on the acorn-crusted ground. As I pulled out my iPhone, zipped my backpack, and threw it over my shoulder, I took comfort in the night sounds. I forced myself to only hear the night sounds. I was scared to hear the sounds beneath them. I focused on the blue-green screen of my phone. I made sure the volume was all the way up. The Forest fell silent. The persistent crickets took a rest. The squirrels stilled. And I heard it then - the murmuring. Low, demure syllables, like the babbling of a baby. Meaningless. Mindless. Going up and down, random, chillingly innocent major flowing into nerve-tingling minor. Something tugged at the hairs on my arms, pulled my jacket tight against my body. The leaves didn't rustle. Then a pull. The skin on my arms dimpled, I felt my cheek sucked outward from my jaw. It was the sensation of running your hand under the tubular extension of a Hoover. The murmuring crescendoed. The inconsistent notes became disharmonious, hundreds of stanzas breaking apart, coming together, running over each other. I opened the recorder app on my phone. I held it close as the vacuum suction became pressure, tearing my legs apart, pulling my hair until it was painful. It was like being caught in a windstorm, except the wind was laser-focused and blowing from all directions. I slid my thumb over my phone. I turned on the flashlight. A blinding-white beam lit the trees. I stared into a black ball head, oversized tunnel-mouth wide open, forming a perfect negative space cone. There were hundreds of them. They surrounded me. They hung from the branches of trees, crouched below bushes, nearly piled on top of each other. All held their mouths open. Hundreds of black tongues vibrating, black-slab feet curled in anticipation, wrinkled flesh vibrating. I pressed down on my phone. Immediately, the murmuring was drowned out by a series of amplified, high-pitched squeaks. Chaos. The AntWalkers collapsed to the acorn carpet, pawing at their own heads. They turned in circles, like dogs chasing their tails. They jumped at each other, trampled each other, swiped at the air with their claylike paws. They rolled on their backs, warped legs kicking grotesquely like flipped beetles. Those in the trees shook the branches; acorns and dry leaves rained to the ground and settled on their pack-mates, further aggravating the mass panic. I ran. Guided by the beam of light emanating from my phone, I tore into the blue-black mass. I trampled over putty limbs, kicked at fleshy midsections, felt lolling black tongues and cold, mushy paws against my legs. In front of me, I noticed a feature of the forest I’d never seen or seen and forgotten - a line of oaks, straight as sentinels, trunks coated in green-yellow moss. The Fuzzy Limebushes. Pain gnawing at my twisted ankle. Dry cotton caught in my lungs. I ignored it. I dashed between the waiting mossy trees. I stumbled, skid to a stop, leaned over panting, the tittering bat cry I’d downloaded onto my phone ringing in my ears. I pressed another button and silenced it. The AntWalkers couldn’t follow me here. The crayon-colored moss signaled the end of their territory. They had no eyes. Yet the one in the playground - the AntWalker that disrupted my date with Luke - had found me. It had found me with its tongue, with its incessant murmuring, until the wail of the police siren scared it away. They moved and hunted like blind dolphins and fruit bats. I’d jammed their echolocation. Now, there was true quiet. I heard neither the AntWalkers’ murmurs nor any auditory remnants of the mass panic I’d fled through. The jangling chorus of crickets had dissipated. If any birds or squirrels dared venture to this part of The Forest, they cowered noiselessly in their nests. Even my footsteps were stealthy. The thick carpet of acorns had given way to loose, surprisingly moist earth. My cell phone illuminated a sparse spattering of trees. Older trees, with hard grey bark and jagged, angular, naked offshoots. Warped, bulbous knots. White roots, jutting out of the dirt. Though these oaks were farther apart than the younger, fertile trees behind me, the beam of my cell phone caught nothing in the spaces between. Just empty blackness. I was in the realm of The Daemon. I breathed in. Sour, acidy cut grass. Sickly-sweet rot. Decomposing produce. Colonel Lewis’s compost heap, with something acrid creeping around the edges. Gassy, sulfury. My backpack was lighter now - empty, save for the little shovel I’d filched from Droxies under the stairs of my dad’s shed. My weapon. I thought of my knife, discarded in the maw of the Great Bagwurm, encased in her gelatin remnants splattered across the playground, an acre behind me. I shone my beam to and fro. I turned a circle. Though I hadn’t gone more than twenty steps, I could no longer see the military line of the Fuzzy Limebushes. I was surrounded on all sides by squat, lifeless arbor skeletons and thick, fog-like, endless darkness. Where was Mathilde? For the first time, I longed for a glimpse of her big blue eyes, white-blonde locks, perfect pink dress. I adjusted my backpack on my shoulder. She gave me my Daemon-fighting weapon. I had to trust her. I started forward. Or perhaps backwards. Inadvertently, I dropped my arm, aiming my glowing phone at the ground. Then I noticed something. In the distance, a sphere of warm golden light. ***** I turned off the flashlight on my phone. I was right - some thirty feet in front of me, there was a light. Like a siren, it beckoned me. Shwoop! Shwoop! Clang! The silence was broken. The sound was coming from the same direction as the golden glow. It was constant, continuous. I’d come this way before. Tommy and me, wandering through the front gate of the park. Luke wasn’t with us. Luke had texted us. He wanted us to meet him at Allister Park. He wanted to play hide-and-seek. '' The compost smell stung. It settled around me like a presence. My heart pounded in my chest, blood crackling through me like electricity. I was getting closer. The light was getting brighter. The sound - dragging, cracking, then metallic - was louder. ''Tommy and me, wandering around the playground. No Luke. We’d looked in every single one of his favorite hiding places. Edging closer and closer to the tree line. Me, terrified of The Forest. Tommy, urging me on. Luke’s messing with us. He’s hiding in the forest because he knows you’re scared of it. '' Two thick, skeletal trees, grey bark peeling, gargantuan warts protruding like many eyes. Branches curving, meeting in the air, framing an opening between them. Between them, the light. Like a gate, or a barrier. Pulse racing, mind stone cold, I crossed to the other side. ''Acorns crunching beneath our feet. Creatures humming, first crickets singing, wind jostling bright-green leaves against each other. Together, a scattered symphony, like the murmuring of voices. The line of mossy trees. Beyond them, a sound like metal on earth. Shwoop! Shwoop! Clang! A form, in front of me. A tall man. Digging a hole. A mountain of earth piled to his left. A boy, digging. Something - some sort of heap, a pile of clothes, blue and white and red. I stepped on a leaf. A crunch. The man dropped the shovel and, with a gasp, whirled around. Not clothes. A limp, mutilated human arm, dripping fluid. A red sweater, discarded like garbage. Micah. The severed limb was Micah’s. Luke. I gasped. Luke - my Luke - was digging a hole in front of The Daemon's tree. His jaw dropped at the sight of me. “Ansley! What the fuck are you doing?” He stepped towards me. I remained frozen in place, fireworks in my head. ''Luke texted Micah. He wanted to talk, he wanted Micah to meet him at The Starshine Gate. Kevin Gideon dropped Micah off in front of a little white house with big windows - one of the little white houses across Huntington. '' Luke was close to me. I could see the sweat glistening on his upper lip. His eyes were steely. Emotionless. ''He texted me and Tommy to meet him. He wanted to muddy the water, give himself an alibi. We were playing hide-and-seek. He was burying Micah’s body. He never thought we would venture so far into The Forest. '' I regained my ability to move. I turned to run. Luke caught my arm. Strong, forceful, vice-like. My eyes rested on his belt. Something attached to it, sheathed. “Ansley, why are you here?” Not a question. A demand. “You killed Micah.” Luke jerked my arm, twisted me to face him. He was smiling, but there was no mirth in his ice-cold grey eyes. He fixed me with his therapist-look, his halcyon grin, the look that had dissolved my childhood fears. It sickened me. “Ansley, you’re fucking delusional.” I screamed. I swung my arm, kicked, clawed, slipped on my bad ankle, fell. My backpack slid, landed with a thump. Luke caught me. Then my head spun, then I was eye-to-eye with coarse grey bark, angry red pain exploding in my nose. Luke’s hand clutching my wrists, arm against my back, chin against my shoulder, holding me against the trunk of a tree like he’d held me, naked, in his bedroom. “I knew you’d go yelling your head off,” he whispered maliciously. “I should have killed you years ago.” I writhed. Another explosion of pain as Luke slammed me, again, against the splintering wood. Then he wasn’t holding my wrists anymore. His hand was at my neck. Clutching something cold and sharp. Pressing it to my jugular. The thing on his belt - a hunting knife. “You should have gone like Tommy,” he oozed. “He dealt with his guilt without screwing me over. Fuck, he owed me. So do you.” I horse-kicked. He pulled his leg out of the way, then jammed his elbow into the small of my back. His knife-hand applied pressure. I felt a sting, then something wet dripping down my neck. “You were so easy to fuck with. All I had to do was say I saw some bogeyman drag Micah away, and you ate it right up. They thought you were crazy; no one would ever believe a word you said. But then you come back here, asking questions, playing ghost hunter with fucking Travis, and I knew it was only a matter of time before you started remembering.” Is it possible for a mind to race while, at the same time, freeze, a blank slate? As Luke forced me against that tree, sharp hunting knife against my throat, that was the sensation that overcame me. Memories. Connections. The blended-up bits of reality molding themselves together, then coming apart. “I have a future, Ansley. You’re not fucking it up. Schizophrenics off their meds disappear all the time.” The Droxies. The shovel, discarded somewhere behind me. The Ouija board. The blood, filling my bathtub. Micah’s voice, screaming from behind a locked closet door. The red sweater. The crawlspace. Zombie Kevin Gideon. Mathilde. The quest. Powdery, grainy, and white. “Ansley, why did you have to come home?” My weapons. I jammed my free right hand into the pocket of my jacket, felt the sandlike powdered concrete between my fingers. I grabbed a handful. In one movement, I threw it over my shoulder and into Luke’s eyes. Luke screamed. The knife was pulled away from my throat. I shoved him with my left hand, and darted like a rabbit. My foot caught something, I landed hard on my injured ankle. A jolt of pain, and the extremity couldn’t support my weight. I fell, catching myself with my hands. I rolled. I’d tripped over Luke’s discarded shovel. I was staring at the pile of dirt. Into the hole he’d dug. At something grey and hard and splintered. Luke was regaining his footing. He turned to face me, opal-grey eyes bloodshot and burning. I didn't recognize those eyes. Pure malice, pure hate. In the light cast by his hanging flashlight, those eyes glowed orange. I pawed behind me, reached into my backpack. With a roar like a freight train, knife in hand, Luke lunged. My hand wrapped around my Daemon-fighting weapon. My shovel. I didn't think, I didn't feel, I just knew. I swung. ***** Next Chapter *****